It is certainly commonplace for a purchaser of goods or services to use a plastic credit/debit card (hereinafter called financial card) as a mechanism for payment for the transaction. The financial card acts as an identification mechanism to a clearing house (or other back-office processing system) to facilitate payment from an account identified by the financial card to an account identified by the merchant who is processing information from the purchaser's credit card. Typically, the financial card information is communicated to the clearing house by swiping the card through a reader that senses information contained on a magnetic stripe on the card. This sensed magnetic stripe information is then transmitted to the back-office for processing. In some situations, RFID and mobile devices/apps can be used.
It is also commonplace to identify users for purposes other than financial transactions, such as for loyalty rewards, by also using a plastic card. Typically, but not always, these loyalty cards contain information in bar code format and thus the bar code information is sent to a back-office processing center to identify the participant.
In some situations, the financial card is used to identify a user for purposes other than payment of a commercial transaction. One example of such use occurs when a person swipes a financial card at an airline kiosk in order to obtain a boarding pass. In such a situation, the information encoded on the financial card's magnetic stripe is used by the airline's back-office to identify the user.
However, while the financial card has the capability of performing financial as well and non-financial transactions, these disparate operations are handled separately. Thus a person wishing to receive loyalty card benefits must produce a loyalty card (or otherwise inform the merchant of the consumer's ID) and have the information transmitted from the loyalty card to a loyalty processing center and then that same person must subsequently swipe his/her financial card to pay for the transaction. Note that in these transactions, any discount or price reduction is performed at the merchant's location before processing the payment information, thereby requiring at least two separate transaction steps.